Utility scripts

This page is dedicated to utility functions that I use often, but can never seem to remember them and typically end up googling for the answer.

Find-and-replace in lots of files

The following is based on this blog post.

To find-and-replace a string in lots of files use perl pie, e.g.

$ perl -p -i -e 's/search-this-string/replace-with-this-string/g' ./*.R

To replace search-this-string with replace-with-this-string in all .R files.

Sometimes we want to perform this recursively, this can be done with the following line

$ find . -name '*.R' -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -e 's/oldstring/newstring/g'